


The Million Ways The World Ends

by SyllableFromSound



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Cooking, Early Mornings, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/F, Hurt/Comfort, Insomnia, Soft Apocalypse, can u tell all i want to do is cook with my gf when quarantine ends, cannot believe i had to invent that tag, gotta do everything my damn self
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-09
Updated: 2020-04-09
Packaged: 2021-03-02 00:21:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,742
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23565994
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SyllableFromSound/pseuds/SyllableFromSound
Summary: "It was like before, when they worked in near-silence and with barely more light than the blue stovetop flame, so as not to wake up anyone else. It might as well have been just the same. Except it wasn't, actually. They'd been in the small kitchen for twenty minutes now, the longest they'd stayed in such a close proximity in weeks."The world is ending, again. Dani and Aubrey decide to make pancakes about it. (Just some quiet pre-Amnesty finale hurt/comfort because we deserved it. Gift for @space-unicron on tumblr!)
Relationships: Dani/Aubrey Little
Comments: 13
Kudos: 28





	The Million Ways The World Ends

Aubrey was up at 4 AM and knee-deep in a Wikipedia article about the origin of leap years when the knock jolted her. After taking a moment to reassure herself that it was a person at the door and not a sign of worse to come, she let her breath out. She got off Duck's couch and went to the peephole. 

Technically, it wasn't impossible that she was hallucinating. It had happened before on nights like this--sometimes when she went long enough without sleep, she heard passing police sirens that weren't there, and once when she got her meds mixed up before bed, she thought she could feel the color blue. But standing outside the door, Dani's form looked solid enough. Her heart beat harder than it had been before, stirred up her insides into mush. She unlocked the door. 

"Dani," she said, and then, remembering the others in the apartment, tried more quietly, "Dani." That was all she could think to say. 

Dani, though, only had to look at Aubrey once and then glance away. "Have you slept at all?"

"No."

"You should."

"Well, so should you," Aubrey answered reflexively. 

"You know I don't sleep," she said in a whisper, all the more muffled as she turned her face toward the ground. There might have been a brief, tired smile there, or just a shadow.

Anyway, this, at least, was familiar. They'd had the same pointless conversation many nights, before everything had happened. Though usually, it had happened when one of them was standing in the doorway of the other's room at the lodge. But they weren't at the lodge. Still, this, Aubrey could handle. "Yeah, I know," she sighed. "Apparently I don't either anymore."

"I didn't think you'd be asleep."

She nodded, then waited for more. When Dani didn't give it to her, she scratched the buzzed back of her head and mumbled, "Um, so...do you need something? Everything's okay at Leo's place, right?"

"Yes. Yes, it's definitely fine, I just..." Her arms squeezed more tightly around the brown paper grocery bag, making it crackle. She seemed to remember, at that point, that it was there, and quickly held it straight out to Aubrey as if she were handing her a squawking baby. 

"Oh," Aubrey said a full two seconds before thinking to take the bag from her. She squinted into the darkness to see an egg carton, white bags full of several different kinds of flour, milk in a glinting glass bottle. "Uh...thank you for the groceries?"

Dani had always been quite a bad bluffer. She released the word, "Sure" in a long, heavy breath, not unlike the huff of a sad dog. Something else seemed to come out of her along with it, something that had been buoying her. 

It was getting chilly. "Is that it? Or do you vant to suck my blood?"

That wasn't what Aubrey had meant. She had meant to ask whether she needed anything, again, really. The shitty joke was supposed to have translated, however crudely, into an outstretched hand. But Dani hadn't taken it that way. She jerked as if in reaction to a static shock from the doorknob.

Pancakes, her addled mind put together in that moment. They were ingredients for pancakes.

"No, that's all," she whispered. "Sorry, I...you should keep trying to rest, or..."

"No, hey, hold on." Aubrey reached for her, almost grabbed the sleeve of her sweater, and then pulled her fingers back as if from intense heat. 

This, she realized, had already become a muscle memory. The flinch was her very body not wanting to repeat what had happened yesterday and in previous days. This past afternoon, when she and Dani and the other Sylphs had made the trek to H2Woah! That Was Fun--the hot springs were closed to them now--they had sat on opposite ends of the backseat, Jake between them. When Aubrey had seen her standing alone over one of the pools and looking straight down, she had thought about it hard, had told herself to let it be, and then regardless had gone over to put a hand on her shoulder. To which Dani had immediately said,  _ Don't _ , and then,  _ Please _ . And it was fine, and it made sense that she wasn't ready for that, and it was alright that she was still grieving after Ned and the government and everything, and still of all things that had happened it was this that made Aubrey feel like throwing up into the deep end.

So she wasn't touching Dani now. Dani stopped anyway at her call, hair swinging as she turned her head back towards her. 

Even in her disguised human form, there was a moon-like shine to her eyes. The pupils looked almost glossy.

Aubrey kind of wanted to apologize, though she wasn't sure for what. She swallowed that instinct back hard and said instead, "Do you want to make pancakes?"

For a moment, she said nothing. Then, quietly, but in a voice that sounded more alive than she had in weeks: "You have to invite me in first, you know."

The sun was far from rising still. But the sky held a little more of blue than of black now, to more starkly outline the silhouette of the crater that had been Mt. Kepler. Duck got up at six, out of habit, though since the encroachment of the FBI on the town, his Forest Service duties had been reduced, and he didn't need to head into work as early. They had a couple hours alone. 

It might as well have been like before, in the lodge. They didn't have the stainless steel surfaces of the building's kitchen--stainless steel that they tried not to muck up too much, lest they invoke Barclay's grouchiness--but this was far from the first time they'd made insomniac pancakes in the wee hours. Dani mixed dry ingredients with the sifter. Aubrey whisked the batter hard. Eggs were broken and left a little shining goo on the edge of the granite countertop, which they resolved to clean later. It was like before, when they worked in near-silence and with barely more light than the blue stovetop flame, so as not to wake up anyone else. It might as well have been just the same. 

Except it wasn't, actually. They'd been in the small kitchen for twenty minutes now, the longest they'd stayed in such a close proximity in weeks. Aubrey spoke one or two hushed words at a time, telling her where the pans and utensils were in the unfamiliar kitchen, and sometimes she didn't even speak to do that, just gestured with her spatula or foot at a cupboard door. In the lodge, their quiet had been the quiet of kids at a sleepover after lights-out, warm in the darkness, struggling not to giggle or to look each other in the eye for too long in case their laughing started up again. They had smeared batter on each other's noses. That felt like a long time ago. The only thing they'd had to worry about back then was disturbing Mama, who at that time would either be asleep or up late working on her art, always there somewhere. Mama wasn't anywhere now. Probably nowhere that existed according to the government, anyway.

Aubrey flipped a pancake straight out of the pan and over the back of her head. 

She wheeled around only to find Dani dropping to her knees on the tile. She caught the pancake in her palm just before it hit the ground. Then she intoned, "ow, ow, shit, ow," flipping the hot, floppy thing frantically from hand to hand so as not to let it fall, the harshness of her whispers making up for the lack of volume. 

"Wait, wait, I gotcha, just hold up--" Aubrey brought the pan over, down to her level. Finally, in sailed the offending pancake like a live fish on land. Even in the dim light, she could see Dani's reddened hands. Both froze, crouched on the floor, locked in eye contact while they waited to hear whether anyone had been woken up by all that. No sound came.

Dani cracked first, with a snorting laugh she tried to muffle by hiding her mouth behind her hair like always. Aubrey wasn't far behind, giggling through her teeth until she sounded like a hissing kettle. They alternated laughing and shushing and more barely contained laughing, calming down only to glance at each other again and start right back up, and this went on for maybe a couple minutes before Dani's voice changed and Aubrey looked up to find her crying. 

"Oh, honey..." 

"It's fine," Dani blubbered, scrubbing her eyes. "I'll be fine, I'm sorry."

"It's not fine," she murmured, swallowing the lump in her own throat. She looked out the window. "You can cry it out if you want. The world's falling apart and everything's shit."

"Falling apart?" She almost laughed again, wetly. "It's fallen. Mama's not even..." She choked herself off.

Aubrey gulped hard again. Gulped down her desire to brush the tears away with her thumb. Gulped down how much she wanted to feel the smoothness of Dani's cheek like a balm on her hand. Her fingers twitched. Instead of putting them on Dani's shoulder or knee or face, she stood and then, holding her breath, held her hand out. 

Through her tears, it took Dani a moment to notice the gesture. She took a few more just to blink in surprise. Aubrey felt her chest about to burst.

Then it was her turn to be surprised. Dani, instead of taking her hand, grabbed her upper arm to pull herself off the floor. Aubrey didn't know whether to jolt away from the touch or melt into it. She did neither. She just stayed steady and stiff. Still, Dani kept touching her bicep. First she clung to it. Then, after awhile of her sniffling and struggling to regain her breath, she started to trace the black tattoo on Aubrey's upper arm. There was just enough light from outside now to see it plainly. 

"It's the Black Rabbit of Inlé," Aubrey murmured. "Watership Down was my favorite book as a kid."

"Mm?"

"Yeah," she sighed. While she talked, she felt her own breathing start to regulate again, though she hardly realized she'd been struggling with it before. If she could keep talking, she was still okay. They both were. "I got that after my mom died. He's the rabbit grim reaper, basically, in the characters', uh...weird rabbit mythology. It's cooler than I'm making it sound. Anyway, he's scary, but you find out in the myth towards the end of the book that he can be fair, too, and even kind of merciful."

As she went on, Dani didn't look at her directly, only nodded and "mm"ed occasionally. Early on in their relationship, this was something that had confused and then embarrassed Aubrey. She had assumed that Dani was annoyed by the rambling and simply too polite to say anything. They had had one of their very few fights over it--or, rather, they had come as close to an actual fight as they ever had. When Aubrey, with no small amount of passive-aggression, had said that Dani could leave if she didn't like hearing her talk, Dani had whipped around to look at her with such shock that Aubrey couldn't fathom how her next sentence could be a lie.  _ I do like it, though,  _ she'd said.  _ I just want to hear your voice as much as I can, no matter what you're saying. _

Dani wasn't actively crying anymore, just sniffling now and then as snot kept dripping from her nose. "I like Fiver best," she said in a voice that was only a bit hoarse. 

"So you have read it!"

She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, the way she sometimes did when she grinned. "You mentioned before it was your favorite."

She tried to ignore the familiar surge in her chest, the good ache that almost overwhelmed her. "Figures you'd like the shy, spiritual one. I was always a Bigwig fan myself. Hey, I burnt the hell out of this pancake. You still wanna make more?"

They did. When they were done, they sat on the couch with their plates and ate and watched with parched, tired eyes as golden light peeked over the broken mountain. On the night that the great stone peak was destroyed, it sent up so much debris and powdered rock into the air that the sun looked pale and watery in the gray sky for days afterward. It lent a certain authenticity to the end of the world, a certain movie quality that was almost validating. Now, after the disturbance caused by the destruction of the mountain, the animals were starting to congregate again in the area. The birds in the morning sounded louder in the now quiet town than they ever had. Or maybe they had always been there and were now simply more noticeable. That, too, was to be expected of the end of days.

The pancakes tasted good. While she had a second serving, she tried to keep a running tally of things that still existed, for now, anyway. Birds. 5:18 AM breakfast. Her own encyclopedic knowledge of Watership Down. Presumably, Watership Down itself, assuming the ragged copy in her room hadn't vanished from the shelf. Sunrise.

The woman tucked up against her, having set her plate aside. Dani had always done something to her. For her entire life, Aubrey had tried to get a hold on her perpetually scattered, racing thoughts and wrangle them into order. As it turns out, Dani could quiet them, gently, with just a touch, just the presence of her body. Right now, Aubrey could feel them settling to the bottom of her skull like sand in a slow-flowing river. In the past, no matter what monster she had faced, she could stumble back to find Dani waiting, always waiting at the lodge, steady and calm and content to let Aubrey lean against her as she stretched. That seemed like a very long time ago.

Aubrey almost wanted an apology, though she wasn't sure what for. She pushed the idea aside. She tried to focus on Dani's cool, soft skin against hers. The sense of familiar calm returned to her, like a loyal pet. Everything, objectively, was shit. Mind-blowingly, deathly awful, actually, if you counted the FBI and the aliens and the distinct possibility of interplanetary war. And it didn't feel that way, just now. It felt like she could evade it all, like the thin girl by her side could hide and shield her from all of it.  _ All the world will be your enemy, Prince of a Thousand Enemies, and when they catch you, they will kill you. But first they must catch you.  _ The still dim, compact living room had the feeling of a den or burrow. The two of them had the feeling of two creatures huddled in the dark, small in the grand scheme of things, but absurdly alive.

"Did you like your apocalypse pancakes?" Aubrey asked.

"Even better than insomnia pancakes."

"Are you scared? About, you know. Everything."

Dani really seemed to think about it before saying, "Kind of...no?"

"That's pretty insane of you, I'm not gonna lie. You're either incredibly metal or you're lying."

"You know I can't lie," she answered wryly. "And, well, I've seen it before, you know. The world ending, I mean. My world ended for the first time when I left Sylvain. I thought I'd die."

Aubrey nodded. She understood. The world had ended on the night her childhood home burnt down. Again when Ned died, when Mama left. Though she was ashamed to admit it, it had even, in some smaller way, ended when Dani seemed to be done with her. She felt that she could lose almost anything else so long as Dani was with her. And here she was, and so, somehow, just in this moment, there was nothing to fear. "Guess the world's always ending, huh?" Aubrey said. "The universe keeps trying to nerf us and we just won't die." 

"It ends all the time in a million little ways." By now, Dani's fingers had worked their way in to weave between Aubrey's. She squeezed. "But you and I won't."

**Author's Note:**

> Yes indeedy it's another story about wlw comforting each other through cataclysm that I'm sure has nothing to do with the current state of the world! Are you surprised?
> 
> As said above, this is the second prize I have made for the raffle I held on my blog @adventuresloane, for @space-unicron! I hope you like the finished product, and tysm for your patience! ^^
> 
> Thanks for those who read this far, and please leave a comment if you enjoyed it!

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [The Million Ways The World Ends [Podfic]](https://archiveofourown.org/works/24314761) by [quoththegayven](https://archiveofourown.org/users/quoththegayven/pseuds/quoththegayven)




End file.
